There's some story online of the guys behind SICP talking about why they abandoned the traditional lisp-based course for its modern python variant, but the gist of it is that, according to them, the kind of "blank sheet of paper" coding that the book was sorta based on is rarer and rarer these days, and that much more of the work revolves around understanding other people's codebases/ideas and building things on top of other people's software. I think this can also serve as a potential shift that could be considered being "harder" in terms of modern computing... in a world where the ecosystem is pretty barren, walking from the very middle to the edge is pretty easy... the more it evolves, the more challenging that trek is.
> revolves around understanding other people's codebases/ideas and building things on top of other people's software
But that's a completely separate topic: "structure and interpretation of other people's mud balls".
Don't screw up "structure and interpretation of computer programs" just because most dev work is making changes to existing code. Teach that in a different course, if you have to.
The coding that the book is based on was never common in relation to daily grunt work: business or scientific data processing and whatnot.
